House Rules: A Novel Read online

  Jacob

  I may be autistic, but I can’t tell you what day of the week your mother’s thirty-second birthday fell on. I can’t do logarithms in my head. I can’t look at a patch of sod and tell you it has 6,446 individual blades of grass. On the other hand, I could tell you anything you ever wanted to know about lightning, polymerase chain reactions, famous movie quotes, and Lower Cretaceous sauropods. I memorized the periodic table without even trying; I taught myself how to read Middle Egyptian; and I helped my calculus teacher fix his computer. I could talk forever about friction ridge detail in fingerprint analysis and whether said analysis is an art or a science. (For example, DNA of identical twins is identical; we know that based on scientific analysis. But the fingerprints of identical twins differ in their Galton details—which evidence would you rather have if you were a prosecutor? But I digress.)

  I suppose these talents would make me a hit at a cocktail party if (a) I drank, which I don’t, or (b) I had any friends to invite me to a party, cocktail or not. My mother has explained it to me this way: imagine what it’s like to have someone with an intense stare come up to you and start talking about medium-velocity-impact blood spatter patterns caused by objects moving between 1.5 and 7.5 meters per second and how they differ from high-velocity-impact spatter from gunshots or explosives. Or even worse, imagine being the person talking, and not getting the hint when the victim of your conversation is desperately trying to escape.

  I was diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome long before it became the mental health disorder du jour, overused by parents to describe their bratty kids so that people think they’re supergeniuses instead of simply antisocial. To be honest, most kids in my school know what Asperger’s is now, thanks to some candidate on America’s Next Top Model. So many people have mentioned her to me that they must think we’re related. As for myself, I try not to say the word out loud. Asperger’s. I mean, doesn’t it sound like a Grade Z cut of meat? Donkey on the barbecue?

  I live with my mother and my brother, Theo. The fact that we emerged from the same gene pool is mind-boggling to me, because we could not be more different from each other if we actively attempted it. We look like polar opposites—his hair is fine and so blond it could pass for silver; mine is dark and gets bushy if I do not have it cut religiously every three weeks (actually, part of the reason I get it cut every three weeks is that three is a good, safe number, unlike four, for example, and the only way I can handle someone touching my hair is if I know it’s coming in advance). Theo is always caught up in what other people think of him, while I already know what people think of me—that I’m the weird kid who stands too close and doesn’t shut up. Theo listens to rap almost exclusively, which gives me a headache. He skateboards as if the wheels are attached to the bottoms of his feet, and I do mean that as a compliment, since I can barely walk and chew gum simultaneously. He puts up with a lot, I suppose. I get upset if plans don’t work out or if something in my schedule changes, and sometimes I just can’t control what happens. I go all Hulk—screaming, swearing, hitting things. I haven’t ever hit Theo, but I’ve thrown things at him and have wrecked some of his things, most notably a guitar that my mother then made me pay for in increments for the next three years of my life. Theo also is the one who suffers the brunt of my honesty:

  CASE IN POINT 1

  Theo walks into the kitchen wearing jeans so low that his underwear is showing, an oversize sweatshirt, and some weird medal around his neck.

  Theo: ’Sup?

  Me: Yo, homey, maybe you didn’t get the memo, but we live in suburbia, not the ’hood. Is it Tupac Appreciation Day or something?

  I tell my mother we have nothing in common, but my mother insists that will change. I think she’s crazy.

  I don’t have any friends. The bullying started in kindergarten, when I got my glasses. The teacher made a popular boy wear fake glasses so I’d have someone to connect with, but as it turned out, he didn’t really want to talk about whether archaeopteryx should be categorized as a prehistoric bird or a dinosaur. Needless to say, that friendship lasted less than a day. By now, I have gotten used to kids telling me to leave, to sit somewhere else. I never get called on the weekends. I just don’t get the social hints that other people do. So if I’m talking to someone in class and he says, “Man, is it one o’clock already?” I look at the clock and tell him that yes, it is one o’clock already, when in reality he is trying to find a polite way to get away from me. I don’t understand why people never say what they mean. It’s like immigrants who come to a country and learn the language but are completely baffled by idioms. (Seriously, how could anyone who isn’t a native English speaker “get the picture,” so to speak, and not assume it has something to do with a photo or a painting?) For me, being in social situations—whether that’s school, or Thanksgiving dinner, or the line at the movies—is like moving to Lithuania when you haven’t studied Lithuanian. If someone asks me what I’m doing for the weekend, I can’t respond as easily as Theo would, for example. I’ll stumble over how much information is too much, and so instead of giving a blow-by-blow description of my future plans, I’ll rely on someone else’s words. Doing my best De Niro Taxi Driver impression, I’ll say, “You talkin’ to me?” Mind you, it’s not just my peers that I misunderstand. Once, my health teacher had to take a phone call in the main office, and she told the class, “Don’t move—don’t even breathe.” Normal kids ignored the statement; a few Goody Two-shoes worked quietly at their desks. And me? I sat like a statue with my lungs on fire, until I was on the verge of passing out.

  I used to have a friend. Her name was Alexa, and she moved away in seventh grade. After that, I decided to treat school like an anthropological study. I tried to cultivate an interest in topics that normal kids talked about. But it was so boring:

  CASE IN POINT 2

  Girl: Hey, Jacob, isn’t this the coolest MP3 player?

  Me: It was probably made by Chinese kids.

  Girl: You want a sip of my Slushee?

  Me: Sharing drinks can give you mono. So can kissing.

  Girl: I’m going to go sit somewhere else …

  Can you blame me for trying to jazz up conversations with my peers a little, by talking about topics like Dr. Henry Lee’s take on the Laci Peterson murder? Eventually I gave up engaging in mundane chats; following a discussion about who was going out with whom was as hard for me as cataloging the mating rituals of a nomadic tribe in Papua New Guinea. My mother says sometimes I don’t even try. I say I try all the time, and I keep getting rejected. I’m not even sad about it, really. Why would I want to be friends with kids who are nasty to people like me, anyway?

  There are some things I really can’t stand.

  1. The sound of paper being crumpled. I can’t tell you why, but it makes me feel like someone’s doing that to all my internal organs.

  2. Too much noise or flashing lights.

  3. Having plans change.

  4. Missing CrimeBusters, which is on the USA Network at 4:30 every day, thanks to the wonders of syndication. Even though I know all 114 of the episodes by heart, watching them daily is as important to me as taking insulin would be to a diabetic. My whole day is planned around it, and if I can’t have my fix, I get shaky.

  5. When my mother puts my clothes away. I keep them in rainbow order, ROYGBIV, and the colors can’t touch. She does her best, but the last time, she completely forgot about indigo.

  6. If someone else takes a bite of my food, I have to cut off the part that his/her saliva has touched before I can eat any more of it.

  7. Loose hair. It freaks me out, which is why mine is military short.

  8. Being touched by someone I don’t know.

  9. Foods with membranes, like custards; or foods that explode in your mouth, like peas.

  10. Even numbers.

  11. When people call me retarded, which I am not.

  12. The color orange. It means danger, and there’s no rhyme for it in English, which makes it suspici